On Kim Bobo's Wage Theft in America
Brook, Daniel
Düring the last presidential transition, George W. Bush made his first political misstep with the nomination of Linda Chavez for secretary of labor. A conservative columnist, Chavez had a long...
...Chavez didn't just talk the talk, she walked the walk...
...But not much pay...
...It would be as if the only penalty for shoplifting were having to pay full value for the goods you stole...
...Luckily, the days of Elaine Chao and Linda Chavez are behind us...
...Still, we are now again a nation of recent immigrants and the most crucial task for NGOs like Bobo's is to serve this enormous and frequently exploited population...
...In the absence of an enforceable rule of law, a Dickensian free-for-all ensues...
...But there was no one to enforce the new law because, in 2002, the Florida legislature had passed a bill to close down the Florida Department of Labor and Employment Security, the state agency that enforces minimum wage laws...
...What has gone on in recent years with minimum wage enforcement should be thought of as decriminalization, akin to what has been done with marijuana in many jurisdictions around the world...
...This is blatantly illegal...
...With the Wage and Hour Division little more than a post office box and letterhead, suing has become the only way to get justice...
...In 2007, 7,310 cases were filed in federal court under the FLSA...
...Raising the minimum wage is one of the only policy proposals that more than 80 percent of Americans consistently agree with...
...The FLSA created an enforcement agency—the Wage and Hour Division—but it also allowed workers to sue for back pay...
...Then it orders workers to remain on site all day, from 7 a.m...
...But in the free market for lawsuits, the private bar gravitates to the most lucrative cases...
...A system with stiffer penalties—ideally with fines that more than pay for enforcement, on the IRS model—could be enacted to increase the number of wage and hour inspectors...
...Docking a car wash worker's pay because business is slow is as illegal as stealing someone's car...
...It should be Frances Perkins...
...to 7 p.m., paying them only for the time when customers show up...
...When ABC News broke the story, Chavez claimed that the woman wasn't an employee...
...In the absence of governmental enforcement and given the predilections of the private bar, independent worker centers like Bobo's Interfaith Worker Justice have an important role to play—but they are not going to end the wage theft epidemic...
...But neither worker centers nor the private bar are adequate substitutes for federal enforcement of our minimum wage laws...
...But the epidemic of wage theft in America cannot be understood apart from the conservative ideological and political movement that has abetted it...
...Chavez subscribed to the Chicago School canard (debunked by empirical evidence) that minimum wages increase unemployment, hurting the very workers they are supposed to help...
...It is sabotage...
...In part, this is because the Department of Labor has done a poor job making immigrant workers aware of its firewall with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement...
...His next job, at Family Dollar, ends the exact same way...
...His manager made him work through his lunch hours and then docked his pay as if he'd taken them anyway...
...It was her behavior that did her in...
...The law is clear: workers must be paid for their time at work whether business is brisk or not, whether they're washing or waiting...
...Bush and his labor secretary Elaine Chao (nominated after Chavez dropped out) both supported raising the minimum wage on condition that states could opt out of the federal requirement...
...And even supermajorities cannot always overcome this well-heeled, well-organized fringe...
...This is not an accident...
...The largest low-wage employers, like Wal-Mart, are still vulnerable because cheating a few thousand workers out of a few thousand dollars adds up to sums even lawyers consider "real money," but who is going to help low-wage workers who've been victimized at small businesses...
...Chavez paid her boarder less than the legal minimum wage (perhaps she was sticking to principle...
...Even enforcement itself has been left to the free market, turned over to the private bar...
...No one disputes that this is the law...
...It is the mirror-image of the virtuous circle in heavily unionized industries (and meatpacking used to be one of them) where labor contracts set a high prevailing wage for all firms...
...For all the success the right has had over the past three decades in smashing the Labor Department, it lost the ideological battle against the minimum wage...
...What happened at the federal level was different only by degree...
...Yet investigations by the Bush administration's Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, charged with enforcing the nation's minimum wage laws, have been almost nonexistent...
...But the tiny fringe group that opposes the minimum wage is very influential, with well-funded libertarian think tanks like Cato, politicians like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and business donors with deep pockets...
...Today it has 750 to oversee 130 million...
...But Hull House operated in a pre-New Deal America where there was no minimum wage and no recognized right to organize...
...Barack Obama appointed Hilda Solis, a strong advocate for workers and the daughter of Latino immigrant laborers, to be his secretary of labor...
...Businesses competing in the marketplace engage in a race to the bottom...
...It polls about even with mom and apple pie...
...As the statistics make painfully clear, an ethical employer trying to pay even the base legal minimum wage at a poultry plant would be hard-pressed to meet its wholesalers' prices or Wall Street's profitability demands...
...Wage Theft in America more than meets the burden of proof that this is indeed an epidemic...
...But the enormous recoveries for stockbrokers and claims adjusters do nothing for poultry workers and car washers...
...The last Democratic Congress raised the minimum wage, and this one could raise it further and strengthen enforcement...
...Federally abetted lawlessness creates a vicious circle where law-abiding employers are squeezed out...
...Why would one appoint a secretary of labor without significant worker advocacy experience...
...This is essentially what has been done with minimum wage enforcement...
...Bobo praises Jane Addams's Hull House, a settlement house for immigrant workers active a century ago, as "a forerunner of today's worker centers...
...Justice seems unlikely for the 78 percent of New Orleans restaurant workers, mostly employed in small independent operations, whom the Clinton administration labor department estimated were stiffed out of wages...
...In time, the progressive activists who founded and ran Hull House realized the limits of their model and helped push for the New Deal regulations we now have on the books...
...Decriminalization works this way: an administration is elected that quietly opposes marijuana prohibition but doesn't want to waste political capital on the fractious and quite possibly futile fight of repealing the laws against drug possession...
...But perhaps her most bizarre position of all was her opposition—on principle—to the minimum wage...
...In his 2007 book The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, New York Times labor beat reporter Steven Greenhouse profiles Drew Pooters, a former military policeman and perhaps the last honest man in corporate America...
...Bobo asks rhetorically, in her understated criticism of Elaine Chao...
...There is no controversy on this point...
...But minimum wage enforcement has become so lax that employers now break the law at will...
...Chavez's far-right positions alone weren't enough to scuttle her nomination...
...So a worker may spend all day at the car wash but only earn six hours' wages...
...For nearly a decade, the Republican Congress kept the minimum wage at historic lows (adjusted for inflation) and slashed the enforcement budget of the Wage and Hour Division...
...Backing up her anecdotes with data, Bobo shows that Shurbrite is not atypical...
...For nearly two years, an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant named Marta Mercado lived with Chavez doing odd jobs for pay...
...They tend to represent high-wage white-collar workers who have been miscategorized as ineligible for overtime...
...There are no conflicting opinions to parse...
...It is a classic example of "how the right turned America into a lawsuit nation" as Chicago labor lawyer, congressional candidate, and author Thomas Geoghegan dubbed the phenomenon in his 2007 book See You In Court...
...Her role model shouldn't be Jane Addams...
...The same study found that 100 percent of poultry plants stole pay—literally every one of the 51 plants investigated...
...In contrast, many urban police departments have had great success making immigrants aware that they will not be questioned about their immigration status if they report a crime...
...From her work with undocumented immigrants, Bobo understands the intimidation that makes them hesitant to blow the whistle on wage theft...
...This is an extreme understatement...
...But with the Left angry about the labor law violations and the Right angry about her "harboring an illegal alien," within days Chavez withdrew her name from consideration for labor secretary...
...Like a police crime scene report, the drama of the book comes from the stark facts not the style with which they're presented...
...Finally, he takes a lower-level job with Rentway, a 750-store rent-to-own chain, only to have his own hours deleted by his boss...
...The causes of wage theft include increased immigration and deunionization, as she says, but the epidemic cannot be understood without acknowledging and examining the powerful forces in the Republican Party that oppose the minimum wage on the merits, that regard the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), pushed through by FDR's tireless labor secretary Frances Perkins, as a mistake...
...Tellingly, the story of the Chavez nomination doesn't appear in Chicago labor rights activist Kim Bobo's Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—And What We Can Do About It, a muckraking-exposecum-activist-manual on the epidemic of workers being cheated out of their wages, most commonly by being paid below the minimum wage...
...Only 151 of them were brought by the Department of Labor...
...Because workers who would be terrified to enter a downtown federal building feel comfortable airing their grievances at a non-governmental worker center in their neighborhood, institutions like Bobo's are crucial...
...Even if an employer gets caught, the typical penalty for stiffing workers out of wages is just paying them back what they're owed...
...Enforcing those regulations is the solution to wage theft...
...But there is a problem with the marijuana decriminalization analogy: there really are a lot of people who believe marijuana should be legal while there are very few who object to the minimum wage...
...A conservative columnist, Chavez had a long paper trail arguing that the "glass ceiling" didn't exist and calling women who bring workplace sexual harassment suits "crybabies...
...Solis can count on popular support if she pursues her agenda as a tough, law-and-order liberal...
...If you were a Guatemalan immigrant being exploited by the nominee for secretary of labor, would you really complain to the DoL...
...In 2004, Florida voters passed an amendment to the state constitution raising the minimum wage...
...In 1941, a few years after the minimum wage was established, the Wage and Hour Division had 1,769 investigators to defend 15.5 million workers...
...A Clinton administration Department of Labor study estimated that 60 percent of nursing home workers are cheated out of wages...
...It was a pitch-perfect position for an anti-minimum wage administration governing a nation that not only believed in the minimum wage but thought it should be higher...
...The cop is off the beat, and the penalties are a joke...
...If that were the law, would anyone be surprised by a shoplifting epidemic...
...It would seem that individual ethical managers have no place in an economy where making employees work off the clock has become standard operating procedure...
...In a truth is stranger than fiction (im)morality tale, first Pooters quits his job at Toys "R" Us rather than delete his underlings' hours as his manager demands...
...The Bush administration supported raising the minimum wage—as long as it didn't actually raise the minimum wage...
...In a nation where states were either following the current federal minimum wage or had enacted higher state minimum wages already, this was a way to preserve the status quo...
...There is no string of legal cases and Supreme Court appeals to sort through...
...Even the Florida voters of 2004 who sent Bush back to the White House voted to raise the minimum wage...
...Bobo avoids partisan finger-pointing in the hope of building a big-tent coalition against wage theft...
...Nashville's chain of Shurbrite-Hi-Speed Car Wash, for example, recruits employees almost exclusively from the area's black homeless population...
...And the official position of the Bush administration was downright Orwellian...
...Instead, it cuts back narcotics enforcement and makes sure that anyone who still gets caught just gets a slap on the wrist...
...Bobo writes that the Department of Labor's "leadership throughout the Bush administration was notably weak...
Vol. 56 • April 2009 • No. 2
